


Money and Love

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-26 00:15:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7552696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things you do for money, some you do for love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Money

**Author's Note:**

> this is a totally self-indulgent fic about how Junkrat lost his arm.

This is how it ends, Junkrat thinks.

He’d been tied down to the rough table for hours, kept in the dark, unable to get any real idea of how long he’d been here. He knew it had to have been a long time because the pain of having his limbs pinioned this way had already ramped up to screaming, mind-numbing intensity and then faded away into a pins and needles agony, only to be released, massaged back into painful awareness, and then tied back down.

This cycle had been performed several times on him since he’d been shut away down here, and if that was the worst his captor had in store, this would have been a cakewalk, but it wasn’t. He wished to God that it was, but it wasn’t.

At intervals that so far seemed random, the woman came back with her knives and her soft, gentle voice, and asked him questions. The same questions, patiently asked, followed by the exquisite pain when he cussed at her or refused to answer. She cut carefully, the knives sliding in just deep enough to pare his skin from the meat of him, repeating her questions with each slice. It was bloody and excruciating, more painful than the terrible, bone deep agony of having broken his arm a few years ago.  So far, though, he’d screamed himself hoarse without giving the knife woman any real information.

There had been torture before, but it seemed crude compared to the surgical precision of the woman with the knives.

When she finished cutting on him (peeling him like a grape, more like), she put something on the wounds, both old and new, that stung so badly it was almost worse than the initial cutting. To keep him clean, she claimed, but it felt like acid to his raw flesh. It was like literal salt in his wounds, preserving them, keeping them raw so she barely had to touch him to make him hiss in fresh pain. Or so he imagined; the truth was that he couldn’t see shit down here, not well enough to tell what she was rubbing into his flayed flesh, or what she wasn’t.

Beside the table, there was a heater of some kind, blasting him with intense heat. He kept his head angled away, feeling like he was baking on one side of his body. It was contrastingly cool on the other side of the room, though how she managed that he didn’t know for sure; it was hard to think logically, with any kind of coherence, when he felt like every part of his body was its own particular agony.

At this point, he was just glad she seemed to be taking her time with him, either truly patient and unconcerned as to the consequences of taking her time, or without a reason to hurry. If she’d decided to lay this on thick, cutting him up so slow and controlled and careful, he didn’t know how long he’d be able to keep his mouth shut.

Hell, in truth, he wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to keep quiet for much longer. There was a limit to how much pain a man could take before even the direst secret seemed worth telling. Anything to make it stop.

As it was, she seemed intelligent and capable. He guessed her reasoning for going so slow was in hopes of the agony driving him to talk. She had to _think_ there was no need to hurry.

It still seemed impossible that he could be here. Impossible that ‘Hog could have gone down, even just temporarily. That the big guy could be dead… unthinkable. He refused to entertain the notion, even though the woman insisted gently that it was true. She also swore to let him go, alive and well, if he told her what she wanted to know. Full of shit all around, she had to be.

She’d hit them with a van. One of those windowless creeper jobs, run them right off the road and had fallen on ‘Rat before he’d been able to process what had happened.

There was a small voice in his head, which insisted itself to be _logic_ , which whispered that even Roadhog couldn’t survive the kind of injuries he’d probably sustained when he’d been thrown from the bike. Hell, Jamie was amazingly lucky to have come away with no worse than what had at the time amounted to a few cuts and bruises and a rattled head.

But it was _Roadhog_. The man had laughed while walking into enemy fire. Just because ‘Rat hadn’t _seen_ him get up didn’t mean he was dead. Maybe he’d gotten a Hogdrogen canister before he’d bled too badly. Maybe healing himself had taken just enough time that he hadn’t caught the knife woman before she could drag ‘Rat away. Maybe he’d been hurt too badly for the Hogdrogen to get him on his feet right away.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. There were just too many ‘maybes’ for Jamie’s taste.

The thought gave him little comfort, and he fought not to shiver at it. Roadhog was coming for him, and that was that.

He tried to force himself to sleep, but it seemed impossible. Sleep was hard to come by when he was comfortable, and he was far from that here; half of him burning up and the other chilled while the places that had been flayed burned in the open air.

Air hissed from whatever heating device it was she was employing to torment him. He could count five seconds on his head, however accurate that was, between each low hiss. When he focused on the noise, it became inescapable, maddening, but the dark room was otherwise silent; counting the seconds between each noise was something to fill the time. Maybe it would bore him soon, sort of hypnotize him and send him to sleep. He needed sleep, _needed it_.

The more he chased it, the more it seemed to elude him, until at long last he was sure he felt himself falling under, eyelids too heavy to keep open. Agony or no agony, he was losing consciousness, and it was the first time he could ever remember truly _welcoming_ the experience. So of course, that’s when he heard the thud and creak of the door opening, feet on the stone steps. They echo as she walked down them, and he felt his guts coiling weakly in fear and anticipation. Most of her cutting had been done on his right hand and arm, with the exception of a few small wounds opened on his left arm. At the sound of her approach, all those injuries came singing to life on that warmer side of him, and he began to tremble for real.

“I’m sorry Mr. Fawkes, were you getting tired?” she asked, her voice soft as satin. She was laying something out near the table he was strapped to; an array of blades, he thought, though there wasn’t enough light for him to tell for sure. “I could provide you much more relaxing accommodations if you’d simply tell me what I want to know.”

“Piss up a rope,” he suggested with false cheer, his tone only spoiled by the tremor that laced it.

He hated that he was afraid of her. Hated that she was getting to him at all, but what could he do. Even if she untied him right now, he wouldn’t be able to fight. His limbs had been asleep for a long time, blood flow restricted; he probably couldn’t even throw a decent punch the way things were.

The woman laughed quietly, as if they were friends having a friendly banter, not a prisoner and his tormentor. He found he hated that too, hated that he was on the wrong side of that laughter. “I’m so glad you’re enjoying yourself well enough for jokes. I’m sure by now you realize that we’re running out of time to appreciate one another’s company.”

“Go root yer boot,” he snarled, clenching his teeth to keep the words from shaking.

Something sang through the air, and he screamed in hoarse agony when a blade slammed home through his index finger, severing the digit and lodging into the wood of the table. He heard with terrible clarity the sound of his lost finger falling to the floor, felt the tug and jerk as the knife was jerked back out of the table.

“I’m terribly sorry to get short with you, Mr. Fawkes, but I’ve _tried_ keeping things nice,” the woman said, resting the point of her knife against the inner curve of the knuckle of Jamie’s middle finger. The skin of the finger had already been neatly peeled away, leaving raw pink sub-dermis for her to poke at. “As I said, we’re running out of time. Now, I’d love to leave you alive, just as I promised, but that’s all going to depend on you. Do you understand?”

Nodding furiously, Jamie bit his lip to keep from screaming again as the knife pressed into his flesh. His hopes that a promise of compliance would earn leniency were quickly dashed as she continued with the slow pressure she’d been applying.

“Did you find anything of value in the ruins of the omnium?”

“Yes,” he bit out. “Christ, everybody knows it, everybody knows I found it, just stop _pokin’_ me and –”

The blade went the rest of the way through his finger with a hollow _thunk_ , biting into the table like it was nothing, separating his flayed finger from his hand as if it were _less_ than nothing. For the first time in a long time, he felt small and vulnerable, unable to even properly struggle against the straps that bound him to the table.

“I didn’t ask who knew, Mr. Fawkes, I asked if you found anything. We’re not having a conversation. You are answering my questions.”

Unable to bite it back, Jamie screamed again, eyes wide in the dark. “ _Fuck_ you! Crazy ass cunt! _Fuck you_!” This time the blade was at his thumb, and he shrieked, high and loud when it clipped through flesh and bone. 

He was breathing in ragged fits as something was wrapped around his upper arm, cinched terribly tight. The tourniquet was well above the flayed mess of his hand and forearm, and seemed to make the stumps of his missing fingers throb harder. He whined as she struggled to slip a finger under the band, barely noticing how her nails scraped his skin for the sharp pain of the added pressure.

 “We’re not playing anymore, remember? I don’t have time for your games, got it?”

Gasping, he fought to school his expression into a glare, pressing trembling lips together in a frown. He said nothing, trembling where he lay, feeling blood spreading across the table.

“The device you found – was it a weapon?”

For a moment he held his tongue, glowering at her through the darkness, refusing to play into her hand anymore. Then, words bursting out of him in sharp barks, he said, “Yer just gonna kill me anyway, why the fuck –”

This time he didn’t scream; the sound that left him was high pitched and nearly soundless, almost more of a gasp as she severed his pinky and ring finger. He was dizzy with the pain and fury that wracked him, but there was a brutal mania building in him that hammered with his slamming heartbeat, and he refused to just roll over and comply. It didn’t matter how much pain he was in; he wasn’t going to give her _anything_. If he was going to die, he’d do it with some damn dignity, not spilling his guts like some yellow cur.

 _This is how it ends_ , he thinks.

Speaking still in that frustratingly patient voice, as if she wasn’t bothered at all by Junkrat’s defiance, the woman pressed a long, slender blade against his stinging palm and demanded again, “Was it a weapon?”

“Yer running outta time, ya said,” he wheezes, voice trembling. “You better run. Kill me ‘r don’t, but if you don’t beat it, Hog’ll kill ya.”

He loses all sense of time as she starts cutting him again, but he holds on to that sound of annoyance that grinds out of her before she states again, flat and mild, that Roadhog was dead. Maybe he was, but she was afraid, desperate even. It didn’t matter that he screams now, because in his heart he’s laughing at her. He’ll die laughing at her.

When the cutting stops, he can’t say. Jamie only knows that something is crashing in the dark, someone is screaming high and alarmed. Blood is everywhere and he is cold, even where he should be warm from the blasting heater.

Lights glare overhead suddenly, and gets his first real look at the knife woman, just in time to see her face and half her head disintegrate in a fine spray of blood and bone as a gunshot thunders through the shockingly tiny basement. He’d imagined something huge in the pitch darkness he’d been kept in, and focuses dazedly on his surroundings before taking in the sight of his massive, bloodied bodyguard, standing over the table.

“Y’ came,” ‘Rat says, and his voice, like the room, is surprisingly small. “Y’ really…”

For a moment, ‘Hog says nothing, focused on unstrapping his charge. His massive hands tremble slightly, fumbling in attempts to remain gentle. “Yeah boss,” he finally rumbles, and Jamie tries to smile at that, loving the idea of being the boss. Wanting to die with a smile on.

And he is going, he can feel that, stress and blood loss catching up to rob him at the very least of consciousness. He holds on just long enough to hear the big man add, “That’s what you pay me for,” in that deep and gravelly voice.

Then, as if it were permission to, he’s swallowed by the dark again.


	2. Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roadhog knows he's not doing all this for the promise of money.

There were channels to go through; a contact who knew a contact, a broker who knew a chop house who was run by someone who knew a sawbones. It wasn’t about trust; it couldn’t be. It was about time, which they were short on.

Roadhog knew that, but it doesn’t stop him from keeping his gun on the doctor.

Vet.

Whatever he was. His office was just the back room of a veterinary clinic, but if you had the cash he’d help humans who couldn’t for some reason just go to a hospital. And while Roadhog certainly didn’t trust this guy enough to take eyes off him even for a second, he _knew_ a hospital would have seen both of the former Junkers in jail before anything could be taken care of. ‘Rat would probably die, and that was unacceptable.

Some doc who lost his license and has to do his work in back rooms, on tables usually reserved for dogs, was the best Roadhog could manage. If the vet kept Junkrat alive, then that was enough for ‘Hog.

“This w’d be, y’ know, a bit easier if y’d put the gun down.”

In response, the enormous man tightened his grip on the weapon, knuckles crackling audibly. The medic looked back at him evenly, lips lightly pursed and thick brows drawn up in a sardonic way that might have been amusing if Roadhog weren’t worried about his boss dying on the table while the asshole wasted time chatting.

“Do what I’m payin’ you to do ‘n quit talkin’.”

The bald man uttered a low laugh, shaking his head and looking back to Junkrat, seeming to check that everything was in order before turning to the tray beside him and selecting a scalpel.

He glanced up at ‘Hog, hesitating over the mangled arm. “Y’ knew he w’s gonna to lose th’ arm, right?”

Roadhog didn’t reply, focusing on keeping the hand holding the gun steady. He supposed he had known, had known since seeing the awful wounds that laced up and down the lower part of his employer’s right arm.  The bloody stumps of his fingers. The awful black and blue marks radiating from the rude tourniquet that had been put on him. It had been stupid of him to think some back alley medic could just fix what had been done to the smaller man.

Finally, he nodded, resigning himself to watch through the procedure. He didn’t know enough about this kind of doctoring to do more than just keep vigil, but like hell was he going to turn away now.

The initial incision is made just below Jamie’s elbow, just above the highest of the nasty wounds the woman had left on the explosives expert. Something about that first cut more than anything made it a reality to ‘Hog, what was happening. He wondered if Jamie would still be fidgeting traps together after this, still building. It was hard to think that the maniacal little man could change much, but losing an arm was a big deal. Traumatic, ‘Hog supposed.

After the cutting, which was done carefully, slowly, started splitting the muscle, Roadhog found his eyes focusing on Jamie’s face more than his surgery. Studying the way his brows drew together, the way his lips pressed into a fine lined frown. Watching the younger man sleep, feeling anger build up in his gut for having let this happen.

It was his fault. Junkrat’s safety and wellbeing was his _job_ , for one thing, but his guilt hardly touched on the fact that this was his employer he was watching be operated on. If they had anything like a standard employee-employer relationship, ‘Hog probably would have just shot the younger man, rather than deal with the stresses that came with trying to save his life.

He’d thought about it, when he’d seen the mess the woman had made of ‘Rat in that tiny cell of a basement; he’d seen how pale Jamie was, the darkness of the blood dripping from the table he’d been strapped to, the sickly sweat beading his brow. Death probably would have been welcome, he thought, remembering Jamie’s feverish eyes on him. He’d gone so far as to reload the scrap gun, thinking, or trying to justify his intention with the thought, that a quick death would be better for ‘Rat than suffering through healing after what that bitch had done to him. It would be a long road, and a bumpy one, and ‘Rat was too much of a whirlwind to ever deal with the healing process properly, Roadhog knew that already.

But he hadn’t been able to do it. He’d had the gun aimed and everything, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The failure could be considered a weakness, he supposed, but he felt better with the choice he’d made in the long run. He couldn’t really trust the doctor (not even as far as he could throw him, honestly), and he knew Junkrat would struggle to accept and adapt to what had been done to him, but it had to be better than having just killed the smaller man.

His gut told him it was the right choice, and his heart, an organ far less trusted but just as emphatic in this particular case, agreed. Because when he cut through all the trappings and bullshit, he cared about Jamie. It hadn’t been a paycheck that had gotten him chasing through the wilderness to track down the cunt who’d snatched ‘Rat after running them off the road. It hadn’t been money he’d been thinking of as he focused all his experience and energy on tracking them, on finding where she’d holed up with his boss.

Worry, fear, anger; all these over a baseline of nearly rabid concern for Jamie, those had been what drove him. And still did, his hands clenched tightly as he glanced between the doctor’s tanned hands and Jamie’s pale face. The gun hadn’t been lowered an inch, still aimed at the medic, but Roadhog was thinking more and more that he’d let the man leave alive.

As long as ‘Rat lived, that would be fine.

Unable to look away, he watched as the muscle was shaped around the sawed off, smoothed bone. It didn’t disturb him so much as enamored; he’d seen plenty of limbs shot and blown off in the line of battle, but never had he seen the process of a limb removal done intentionally.

It reminded him of butchery, skilled and neat.

“I’m gonna close th’ amputation,” the doctor said, not looking up from his work. “It’s gonna have a drain, an’ yer gonna have to make sure he keeps clean, ‘r else he’s liable to lose more a his arm – or his life. Get me?”

Roadhog didn’t speak at first, only nodded before realizing the doc wasn’t going to see it. “Yeah,” he rumbled after a moment, tearing his eyes away from the surgery to Jamie’s face. He looked tense, pained, even in sleep, and the older man felt an odd lurch in his gut at the sight.

That seemed to be plenty for the doctor, who began to apply quick, neat sutures, sealing the flaps of skin over the stump. When he finished, ‘Hog looked away from the surgical table finally, glancing at one of the high, wire reinforced windows. It surprised him a little to see the eastern sky already growing rosy; the sun had barely been down when he’d gotten here with ‘Rat.

When he looked back, he was surprised to see the doctor, shed of his bloody gloves, writing something on a script pad.

“I ain’t gonna see you again,” he said as he wrote, “But this’s th’ name of a doc – still licensed, but works w’ all sorts fer cash – who specializes ‘n prosthetics. Y’ll wanna see her. Or _he_ will, at least.”

Taking the offered paper in his free hand, a little surprised that it had been considered, ‘Hog gestured shortly with the gun. “Thanks. Now get lost.”

A smile spread over the doctor’s thin lips, and he offered a little salute before vacating the room with all due haste. He’d have a mess to clean up later, but ‘Hog figured keeping his life was worth it. A generous trade by any measure, especially considering the bundle of cash he’d given the man to work on ‘Rat.

Holstering his gun, he approached the table, eyes darting over Jamie’s prone form. Tenderly, his big hands as gentle as he could make them, he bandaged the stump and separated his boss from the IV line. Junkrat only stirred a little, moaning softly when ‘Hog lifted him from the table, carrying him outside and placing him carefully in the sidecar of his motorcycle. The bike was dinged up and scraped pretty badly, but still ran fine, and ‘Hog hoped to put some miles between them and this town before Rat woke up.

It was going to be a long road to recovery, but ‘Rat would not lack for assistance or care. He had Roadhog, who was maybe only starting to figure out how deep his affections ran for the smaller man, but who knew where his devotion lay nonetheless.

He’d have Roadhog, and Roadhog aimed to be enough.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love, love is going to lead you by the hand  
> Into a white and soundless place  
> Now we see things as in a mirror dimly  
> Then we shall see each other face to face
> 
> ― The Mountain Goats, Love Love Love


End file.
